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The conference on "Urbanization and Poverty", jointly organized between the World Bank and George Washington University-Institute for International Economic Policy (GWU-IIEP), will bring together academics and development practitioners over two days to discuss the challenges of urbanization in view of rural-urban structural transformation.

The world is urbanizing rapidly, with cities today concentrating more than half the world’s population. While it is widely accepted that development and urbanization go hand in hand, the expansion of cities gives rise to both opportunities and challenges, with countries urbanizing in quite different ways. Urbanization has been occurring at different times and different paces, and some countries have concentrated the urban populations in few mega cities, while others have spread the urban populations across many smaller towns. Particularly little is known about the relation between the pace and nature of the urbanization process and the evolution of inequality and poverty. This conference aims to initiate a dialogue among all stakeholders on the drivers and patterns of urbanization and their consequences for inequality and poverty to elicit key insights for policymakers, with special attention to Africa’s unfolding urbanization process.